Tag Archives: it outsourcing company

Following the audits conducted in our Orléans headquarters, and Brasov and Sibiu delivery centers, the Afnor auditors confirm our ISO certification!The audit allowed them to identify many strong points, which highlight:

a rich prospecting and customer-focused system based on a rather exhaustive process that is constantly evolving,

high level activities regarding recruitment, collaborator integration and training, which is seldom a characteristic of other companies,

diverse and evolving tools implemented to support our processes,

real and visible activities of continuous improvement, which allow us to achieve better results with less effort.

But this year 2 observations have also been raised for the first time. They highlight some gaps we had already found during the internal audits and to which the auditors wanted to draw our attention:

Outsourcing your IT services goes beyond trusting a third party with the creation of a product or solution. The process must be part of a real corporate strategy entailing an engaging and productive approach. This is why we have always taken time to explain to our clients what we do, how we do it, and what the costs are. But in order to understand how the entire process works, maybe you should first come and visit our delivery centers.

What are the benefits of this discovery circuit? Among other things, you can:

check out your service provider’s premises

speak to your collaborators face to face

better understand their culture and share your own corporate culture

spot the constraints that a long-distance relationship may bring along

After convincing world-class startups all over Europe and now already serving 3 American clients in Cincinnati and Boston, it became obvious to Pentalog that time had come to dedicate a special offer to the US market and locate a first operation team in Boston.

Skill Pipe!
After a deep study of Boston startups, we noticed that despite the incredible number of world-class students there, they are never enough to cover the inextinguishable imagination of MA startup creators! Furthermore, the number of powerful VCs creates a permanent acceleration of IT salaries. Hence the insolvable deficit of programmers most of the ventures suffer, slowering roadmap execution.

So basically our idea is simple: creating a virtual pipe of IT skills by connecting the Romanian, Moldovan and Vietnamese capabilities to the Boston Startup hub through a local

The results of the Digital Services Companies seem to follow the same pattern. They vary between bad and very bad. Almost all big actors have registered low sales figures and in this context managers will surely start reconsidering burden sharing. This makes me ask myself what’s the purpose in preserving sales forces that are already more or less unproductive and most of the time outdated (not Anglophone enough, not cloud compliant, not 2.0 compliant, and stuck to an obsolete business model)?

Converging forces sustainably call for a reduction of the sales forces. Obviously, the movement of market concentration matches the referencing methods used by large groups. They both lead to the concentration of trade flows in the hands of an increasingly low number of interlocutors on each side.
The gross margin, confined between a client

We were stunned! For 80€ per day and per person, Cosmina and I have rented two work-spaces at CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center), in Boston’s main cluster, founded by the MIT giants.

The other day I posted on Facebook a short video that speaks for itself about the place dynamics: today 500 companies share this unique space and invent an intense social life. Most of the people you come across are their own employer at this stage, which does not prevent them from having already raised up to $500 000! Some of them have raised a few millions and are counting now their first employees.

What I love most about this place is its entrepreneurial environment. It seems to have no equivalent on the west coast Berkeley or Stanford or at least not of this dimension.

Pentalog has just published 3 high level documents on support and R&D issues for wireless technology companies. Actually this would be also relevant in most sectors that use communication technologies (radio, GSM, WiFi, BT, Wimax…).

Based on the 5-year experience in outsourcing with 80 engineers specialized in customer support, who work in the front line with the clients of our client (global leaders in mobile telephony), we were able to simultaneously grasp the 3 dimensions of such a project, right under the nose, at that time, of the Indian and French giants:

responsibility

hyper-scalability

cost optimization

This incredible experience resulted from a great collaboration between France and Romania, and was based on large skills transfers which demanded the implementation of a very strict SLA, as well as world-wide business travels (China, Korea, India, USA,

Anevia, a solution and service provider for interactive TV and video on demand (VoD) on different supports (TV, computers, mobile telephones) has entrusted Pentalog with the industrialization of its product testing process with the aim of optimizing quality while reducing costs. Since 2009, a dedicated team of 5 persons from our Vietnam-based offshore delivery center has been in charge of these activities.

François Gombault, Professional Services Manager at Anevia, has given us more insights:

Pentalog: Why have you decided to outsource your project?

F. Gombault: We have resorted to an outsourcing company in order to gain immediate expertise withproduct testing and software testing, skills that already existed inside our company, but which required full-time specialists. We had to build up a dedicated team and outsourcing made it possible within a very short

After a two-week-trip on the West coast of the U.S (see articles here and here), Pentalog has been reconsidering the idea of a new destination. This time we are planning a trip to the East coast, to Boston (April 30th – May8th 2013).

Capital of the state of Massachusetts, Boston is among the top 10 most economically powerful cities in the world (see table, source McKinsey Global Institute, May 2012).
Boston is a famous higher education center with a strong emphasis on scientific, engineering and technological education and research (Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Boston University). This city is the second technological cluster after California’s Silicon Valley, a complete ecosystem ready to adopt and promote the emerge of products, services and innovative business models.
We consider Boston as a possible destination to

After a second semester of 2012 characterized by a gradual performance slowdown in terms of both growth and profitability, Pentalog had a rapid recovery at the end of the year by reducing bench time rates by half (slowing down the recruitment, process and optimizing the staff). This rate is currently lower than 3%. Additionally, we have reduced the allocated budget to social and event marketing. The management’s focus shifted toward new business opportunities.

Pentalog has reasons to be happy. Our clients place our offer higher and higher in fields like e-commerce, telecom industry, soft R&D or consulting in Information System.

Now including a consulting department that is quickly joining the league of the sector leaders, Pentalog‘s overall offer of industrialized software production (mastering costs, quality and deadlines) draws more and more clients willing to use only one player, able to fully engage its responsibility. Overall means that thanks to the joined forces of Pentalog Institute (consulting and technology) and its historical nearshore and offshore capacities, we are now able to intervene on ergonomics, technical architecture, implementation of software factory and as far as production of course, in the best quality and price conditions. This complete cycle for performing software or web operations is integrated by

In these election times, in France as well as in the USA, this is a popular word. Easy to use and definitely catchy, it reconciles the extreme left, the extreme right, the extreme center and the elderly. It works almost on its own! There is a risk involved, meaning the potential for a lot of foolish economic decisions, but in general politicians and journalists tend not to care about it.

For example, we systematically forget to say that, when an Indian company orders 127 Airbus planes (which will bring 10 billion to the South-West of France and Northern Germany), this happens because there are more and more Indians who can fly due to earning higher incomes. Of course we want to sell these Airbus planes to them! But it would be even better if the